A Respectable Period Of Mourning

It’s been a strange couple of weeks in my world. A funeral, an over 40s MOT style health check, the arrival of my divorce, both kids home sick for a whole week, a school parents’ evening followed by drinks with my ex-husband, another funeral and almost a comedy night but I had to cancel due to the aforementioned sick children. I really could have done with the laugh.

And that’s just the edited highlights. Don’t forget to factor in the usual work, washing, ironing, cooking, shopping etc. Firstly, I’m mentally and physically exhausted. Secondly, I appear to have developed a slightly wonky sense of what’s appropriate in any given setting.

I already fessed up to the potentially inappropriate attire at the first funeral regarding my sexy boots and red nails (see A Time For Macaroni Cheese). Regardless of theses reservations, I wore the same outfit to the second funeral. This time, however, there were no red nails but that was more to do with not having time to paint them rather than any moral decision on my part.

However, it seems my inappropriateness knows no bounds. At funeral number two, I actually flirted with the celebrant! What was I thinking? And he used to be a vicar! After coming to my senses, and also realizing he was in fact married, I clearly backed off. I needed to regroup.

But even my unconscious mind appears to be ethically challenged. A few nights later I had what can only be described as an erotic dream involving one of the teachers at my kids’ school! Obviously, I had absolutely no control over this little fantasy, although I must say it wasn’t altogether unpleasant!

There are obvious moral questions to be raised here. Firstly, is it acceptable to flirt with an official, or anyone else for that matter, at a funeral? And secondly, are teachers off limits, subconsciously or otherwise?

In answer to the former query, I guess a funeral is as good a place as any to get flirting. As long as you’re not flashing those “come to bed” eyes during the service or winking at the bereaved spouse, I think the event itself is fair game. And let’s be honest, when you hit forty you spend more time at funerals than you do weddings, the classic place to meet a future spouse apparently, so you’ve got to include them in your list of possible venues.

Addressing the teacher issue, I would suggest they are indeed off limits. Well, perhaps until your last child’s final term at that school so any damage is mitigated. But that’s just my personal opinion. At the moment. I’m always happy to admit I’m wrong and adjust my stance accordingly…

In either case it’s irrelevant. My flirting skills are such (see Don’t Look Down) that the unsuspecting celebrant still has no idea that I was trying to flirt with him anyway. And, as the incident with the teacher took place in a dream I would suggest there’s even less chance of him being aware of the goings on. Phew!

But all this does raise further questions. When is it time to date again? How long after the end of a relationship or death of a partner is it ok to see other men? What is a respectable period of mourning these days?

Well, here’s the answer. I have absolutely no flipping idea! And neither does anyone else. However, bearing in mind many people are dating whilst still in their current relationship and many others never date again, I can state with confidence that the answer lies somewhere between the two.

The overriding thing to remember is that you’re ready to date when you’re ready to date. It’s nothing to do with how many days, weeks or months have gone past. And it’s nothing to do with anyone else so don’t feel judged.

“Everyone will think I’m dating too soon and that I never loved him…”

When your partner’s gone they’re gone. Is waiting around for the six-month marker really going to make a difference? Will it bring them back to you, if indeed you want them back? Does it mean you loved them any less? No, it doesn’t. And what do those people know anyway? Acceptance of loss often begins earlier than those on the outside realize, with a failing relationship or a diagnosis of an illness. Your grieving may have begun long before the end came, and some time before you shared the information with those beyond your relationship. They’re in no place to judge.

“My friends think I’m hanging on for him to come back and that I should have started dating ages ago…”

So they think you’re waiting too long. No one knows how it feels to be inside your head, processing your emotions. They don’t know if you’ve had enough time to get over your loss and adjust to life without your partner. A long time ago, after the end of a serious relationship that I thought I’d come to terms with, I had a fling. Turns out I wasn’t over the first relationship after all and was frequently found crying in my new man’s bathroom in the middle of the night. Not good. Especially as he had two housemates and no lock on the bathroom door but that’s another story! Anyway, what seems like too long for one person can be too soon for another.

Everyone’s different.

Think about giving yourself time to grieve and finding out who you are as a person before moving back into dating. Or don’t. Get out socializing, go on a date and have some fun! It really is up to you and how you deal with things.

It’s not easy making that first move. It’s hard to imagine being in a relationship with someone else; confiding in another man; sitting on the sofa with them; being intimate with anyone other than your husband; letting them meet your kids; referring to a story from your life that they have no knowledge of. It all seems so difficult and not necessarily worth the effort.

But remember, a date doesn’t mean a relationship. It’s just a date. It’s an evening out with drinks, dinner and conversation. That’s all.

When you first went out with your previous partner, did you think that you’d end up married? Probably not. I know I didn’t.

“Love is like a virus. It can happen to anybody at anytime.”

Maya Angelou

Don’t overanalyze things. Relationships don’t have to last forever, as we’ve found out to our cost. You can flirt or go on a date and if it doesn’t feel right, you just go home afterwards and give yourself a bit more time. Or maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a nice evening.

Love

SPB

xxx

A Time For Macaroni Cheese

I knew it was coming. My solicitor advised me last week that she’d applied for the Decree Absolute and it should come through any day. I got myself prepared. I went to my Storage King unit and extracted my wedding box. I wanted to be ready so that when it arrived I could, if I wanted to, spend some time looking through the wedding paraphernalia representing our coming together, and finally say goodbye to my marriage.

It was still a shock when the email arrived. And with the most unfortunate timing, I read it just as I was walking into school to collect the kids. Mask on. All the way home, with a stop off at my sister’s house, I held onto my façade and told no one. I just wasn’t ready to say it out loud. My marriage was over.

I decided to wait until the kids were in bed, then go through the wedding box, shed my tears, then package it all away to move on with life.

That was the plan. But when do things ever go to plan?

By the time we’d got home, eaten dinner and the kids had gone to bed I remembered I needed to make 24 dairy free, nut free chocolate cupcakes for my son to take to school for his birthday the next day. Except, I had no cocoa powder, and not enough eggs. I ended up with some rather unappetizing looking buns, for want of a better word. I squirted them with Dr Oetker’s chocolate icing (thankfully also dairy free) and shoved them in a tin, hoping I wouldn’t be judged too harshly by a precocious 9 year-old Mary Berry wannabe the next day.

So, to the wedding box.

Crap! I hadn’t wrapped his presents or set up the birthday banners! I raced around like a very silent mad woman trying not to wake the sleeping children upstairs. At last, I was finished.

Ok, time for the wedding box.

Double crap! I had a funeral the next day too and, for reasons I won’t bore you with, I had to pack a bag of suitable clothes to change into at my sister’s house after walking the dog. Having realized I looked 6 months pregnant in my classic funeral dress, I threw all the black items of clothing I owned into a bag and decided to worry about it the next day.

Finally, I had the time to sit down with my wedding box.

Except by that point, it was almost midnight and I was exhausted. I wasn’t feeling remotely sentimental and wouldn’t have done the task justice. I would have been doing it just to tick it off my to-do-list but, as much as that generally pleases me, it didn’t feel right. I went to bed instead. Although not for long…

Birthday presents, pancakes and Star Wars Top Trumps (strangely addictive by the way) began at 5.30am and I was in full on mummy mode! We partied, then I took the kids to school, walked the dog and got into my funeral clothes with 25 minutes to spare.

For those interested in my attire, I decided on black trousers with a slight floral imprint, a sheer black long sleeved top and a black over-top with a little fringe at the bottom, a black suit jacket and some rather sexy high-heeled suede boots. My team of dressers would have been proud (see Who’s Up For Some Zhooshing?!).

I debated with myself for quite some time about the suitability of the boots for such an occasion but I decided they worked with the outfit, made me feel happy and were the only footwear I’d packed anyway.

Sitting at my sister’s house while everyone else was getting ready, I realized I wasn’t used to having a 25 minute window with nothing urgent to do. So, I cut and painted my nails whilst listening to the radio. It was bliss. And if you think the sexy boots were disrespectful…my nail varnish was red!

I promise you that the deceased would have been quite happy with the whole thing. And when I say “the whole thing” I don’t just mean the raunchy boots and vampish nails. She had been ready to die for a long, long time. For her, this would have been a release. She was free of her failing body and in a happier place. It was her time.

This got me thinking. It was her time to go and here I was having time for me to paint my nails. There’s a time for everything and, despite the way I generally live, that doesn’t have to be dictated by the predetermined timetable of the day.

Sometimes, the time’s right for one thing and not another. And you don’t know until it happens what that thing is.

Time to be happy, time to grieve

Time to play, time to cry

Time to paint your nails, time to close your eyes and sleep

Time to wear high-heeled boots, time to snuggle in your PJs

Time to nibble a salad, time to devour macaroni cheese

Time to reflect

Time for the wedding box

So that evening, I didn’t rush it. I did what felt right at the time. I put the kids to bed, slipped into my PJs, ate a bowl of macaroni cheese, scoffed 2 chocolate éclairs, and then I was ready.

In the same way that you can’t plan when you’ll be ready to do these things, it seems you can’t prepare yourself for how you’ll feel either. My emotions weren’t what I’d expected.

Of course there were tears. I touched the boxes that had stored our wedding rings. I felt the feathered hearts glued with care to the front of each order of service. I read the index cards from my now ex-husband’s wedding speech and I was touched. He knew me so well and loved me so much then. When did that change?

But equally, I laughed at the comments in our wedding guest book including the competition between our two witnesses over who was best at the job and the wedding haiku written by a particularly lovely friend.

I smiled at myself in the mirror as I put on my wedding tiara. It didn’t really go with the PJs but the wedding dress is now 2 sizes too small with a gravy stain down the front so I wasn’t about to do the full bridal thing. Here’s a tip, choose your wedding breakfast carefully taking into account your clothing for the day!

But the most unexpected feeling was one of warmth. People’s comments about how happy we looked, the poem I wrote as one of our readings called My Best Friend, the laughter on people’s faces in the photos taken on the disposable cameras… what a day!

I remembered how happy I was, not just on that day, but also in my marriage.

I reflected on our time together. The nights out, nights in, holidays, arrival of our children, plans we made, homes we built, achievements, successes, crises we’d come through together, times we’d stood by each other despite feelings of betrayal, difficulties in our marriage we’d overcome, issues we were trying to resolve, then the separation and divorce.

Our marriage was more that just the end bits. With all the negativity and upset of more recent years, it’s so easy to forget the rest. A marriage is something that happens over time. And that reminded me of one of our readings...

EXTRACT FROM THE VELVETEEN RABBIT

By Margery Williams

"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but Really loves you, then you become Real."

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get all loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

So here I am.  My hair hasn’t quite been loved off, although the grey roots are in need of some attention. My joints are more stiff than loose due tennis elbow and now a cricked neck. I’m not too shabby, but perhaps a tiny bit overweight. Nothing that a few more running sessions and my new Nutribullet can’t fix.

Overall, I’m not as fit as I was 20 years ago, but I’m real (see A Different Sort Of Singleton). My life, my marriage, my baggage made me real, made me who I am today. And, on the whole, I like me.

This week, as my marriage has finally come to an end, I refuse to regret a single moment of it. This reflection has given me the space to see that there was a time for us to get married, there was a time for us to be happy together and there was a time for it to end. However much I didn’t want that to happen, that’s the way it was.

And now, it’s time for me to move forward, but without bitterness. Time to draw a line under the darkness that’s dominated recently and step back into the light. So, bring on the sexy boots and bright red nails – it’s my time now. Or, I could just pop my PJs back on and nibble some Green & Blacks chocolate. Just for now…

Love

SPB

xxx

Mr Blue Sky… The Finale!

So, did you listen all the way to the end…?

Last week I wrote about the ELO track Mr Blue Sky and how smiley and happy it made me feel (see Mr Blue Sky). And, I also said that the last line made me giggle every time. But did you work out what it was, and more importantly, why it’s in there?

I’ve just popped in for a quick midweek update to give you the answer.

So… SPOILER ALERT… stop reading if you haven’t had a chance to listen to the track yet and want to play along. Or stop reading if you don’t really care what the answer is. But if you’re interested, here it comes…

Throughout the track, a synthesized voice sings “Mr Blue Sky”. Then, at the very end, after a phenomenal instrumental section I should add, a heavily synthesized and less clear vocal emerges.

The words are often thought to be the same as throughout the rest of the song, “Mr Blue Sky”, but the final line is actually “Please turn me over”.

The track is found at the end of side 3 of a double LP back in the days of vinyl and the listener was instructed to turn it over to hear the next track.

You’re welcome!

Love

SPB

xxx